Sun kneels outside the back door to the restaurant, takes off his backpack, unzips it. “This is your spot.” He indicates the ground next to him with his chin. “Eyes up.”
I obey, squatting against the wall and scanning the section of parking lot that’s visible from the back of the building. The only car is Jules’s hatchback, which she turned around to face the street after dropping us off. From where I am, I can’t see the boulevard, but I hear the intermittent sounds of passing cars. In front of me, across the row of staff parking, there’s a high wall between us and the video store behind the restaurant. To my left there’s a young row of fig trees that Dad planted between us and the adjacent gas station.
We’re wearing black clothes and disposable plastic gloves. There are stockings on our heads and shower caps on our shoes, which seems a little backward. It’s three in the morning.
Sun takes a small black drill out of his backpack. Even the bit is black. He begins drilling through the dead bolt on the door. The whine of the drill itself is exceptionally quiet, but the metal-on-metal screech shreds my nerves like a cheese grater. After destroying the dead bolt, he drills through the center of the doorknob and slips inside.
I look at our escape vehicle and see that Jules has reclined her seat most of the way. She’s lying back with her head turned toward me, watching through the rear window. The night is humid and near.
Long minutes pass and I begin to calm down. Sun and the noise of his weird drill seem like something that happened a couple of hours ago. I squat against the building, hugging my knees, making myself small. Little thoughts about cops and big thoughts about Dad present themselves at the borders of my mind, but I abandon them in favor of an alert, ready watchfulness. I got a lot of practice at this over the past few years, sitting on the bench and waiting to be called into action at a moment’s notice. A hair over ten minutes per game for four seasons. Twenty-six box scores with Did Not Play—Coach’s Decision next to my name. One barely relevant three-game suspension for violating team alcohol policy. I don’t think about it. I feel glad to have a task to focus on, a plan of action, something other than sorrow. I relax, eyes up.
A man pushes a shopping cart along the sidewalk on the other side of the gas station. The cart makes a lot of noise and seems to be sprouting a variety of accessories, which the man stops to adjust, cursing volubly. He tosses off some further profanity at another man walking on the street. The other man, dressed all in white, ignores him; he leaves the sidewalk, cuts through the gas station, and heads toward the row of fig trees.
Now he sees me and breaks into a run in my direction. I see the ponytail. Muscles tense in my forearms, along my spine. I replay Sun’s instructions in my head, slip through the door and into the hallway. It is dark except for the faint green glow of the EXIT sign above the door behind me, and adrenaline lights up my body as I will my eyes to adjust, every hair on my arms and neck reaching out into the dark, seeking information like antennae. The door to the office is closed, and through the glass I see Sun crouched by the safe with a small, bright flashlight in his mouth. I imagine that I see Dad in there, too, searching around for his reading glasses or snacking on some stir-fried noodles in black bean sauce and watching Cirque Du Soleil DVDs on his little flat-screen.
I rap twice on the glass. Then I run down the hall and step halfway through the door to the kitchen.
I wait for Ponytail to appear at the other end of the hallway, giddy with anticipation, my mind full of the stillness of the restaurant. When he reaches the door, he stands there sidewise for a moment. He’s holding something in his right hand, low. We stand still, half-facing each other at opposite ends of the hallway, my pulse hammering in my ears, adrenaline crashing around in my blood. Then he steps toward me.
“Bié dòng!—Don’t move!” he shouts, raising his hands in front of him. I slip into the kitchen. The light of streetlamps coming through the dining room windows spills in above and beneath the saloon doors on the other side of the kitchen, and I can see more. I take a few steps in, turn to face the door, crouch into an athletic stance. My frantic heart feels ready to escape my idiot body and find a hiding place. Then Ponytail bursts through the door, a pistol extended in front of him in both hands.
“Who are you?” he says in Mandarin.
Stall, I tell myself, and I open my mouth, but exactly zero words come out. He lowers the gun a little, takes two slow steps toward me. Then he hears Sun’s footsteps behind him and turns—too late. Sun’s first kick, a roundhouse right, catches Ponytail’s wrists and sends the gun bouncing off a wall and into a sink. His second kick is a swift, powerful left-footed reverse to the chest that throws Ponytail backward into me.
We crash to the ground. I scuttle backward on my hands and heels as Ponytail springs to his feet and throws a punch at Sun’s head all in one motion. Sun deflects the blow with his right palm and rolls the next one into his side, but they keep coming: Ponytail is as quick as a welterweight contender, all over Sun in a blur of fists and feet, elbows and knees. Sun steps back, moving like a sheet of silk between Ponytail’s limbs, guiding them around the periphery of his body, hollowing out and changing shape with each blow, so that even when he gets tagged, nothing connects with force.
Sun warned me to stay out of any fights unless he asked for help. His defense is deft and fluid, but he’s backing up, he’s barely fending off the blows, and he doesn’t make any attack of his own. As he retreats in a circle around the kitchen, he passes through a shaft of light from the dining room windows, and I see the perfect equanimity in his motions. He’s not struggling to evade Ponytail’s strikes—he’s studying them, picking up the rhythm and the tendencies. Then he catches a punch with a clawlike grip around the inside of Ponytail’s wrist. He wrenches the wrist open, turning Ponytail’s whole arm, shoulder, and chest upward, and Ponytail cries out in pain. With an explosive exhalation of breath, a shwuh! that comes directly from his diaphragm, Sun slams the edge of his right hand into the inside crease of Ponytail’s elbow.
“Jesus Christ,” I say, as Happy Year’s new head of security crumples to the kitchen floor.
Sun snatches the gun out of the sink and releases the magazine, which he slips into the pocket of his black jeans before tossing the rest of it under the saloon doors into the dining room. Ponytail is lying prone, breathing peacefully. Sun hops onto his back, pats him down, and retrieves a flip phone from his pocket. I’m still sitting on the floor, watching this guy handle this criminal shit like he’s making the same omelet for the millionth time.
“Let’s go,” Sun says.
I climb to my feet and give Ponytail a kick in the ribs, eliciting a shallow groan. “Did you kill Vincent Li?” I shout down at him. No response. I kick again, harder. And again. “Who killed Vincent Li, you shitbag?!” Tears soak into my stocking, making it harder to see.
Sun grabs my arm, hisses into my face, “He’s not going to answer you.” He drags me out of the kitchen. As we run down the hallway, he snatches up his backpack from the floor in front of the office. He stops at the door, pokes his head out, and then runs out to the car. When Jules sees us coming, she starts the engine and reaches across the passenger seat to open the door for me.
I sprint around the back of the car and jump in next to Jules. Sun swings into the back seat and pulls the stocking off his head.
“Good,” he says to Jules, patting her headrest.
I pull the damp stocking off my head and heave a couple of deep breaths, forcing myself back toward detachment, equilibrium. In a moment we are out on the street, back in real life, and it’s over.
We come through the door and discover Andre dozing on the couch, waiting up for us like a giant mom. He stirs, rubs his face.
“Success?” he asks.
“Kind of, except Sun had to kung fu the crap out of some guy,” I say.
“You kung fu’d the crap out of someone?” Andre drawls, raising his eyebrows, marking the vibe gap between his drowsy calm and me: thoughts racing, body aquiver with recent violence.
“Yes,” Sun admits.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell us you were a martial arts expert?” Jules demands. “Forget what Dad said for you to tell us. Was that part of your job? Beating people up?”
Sun hesitates, then nods. “Little part,” he says.
I turn to Andre. “Can we switch to Chinese?”
Andre narrows his eyes. “Yeah. Sure. Cool with me. I was just about to turn in anyway.”
“Good night, Andre,” Sun says, and Andre pats him on the head as he ambles to his bedroom.
“First of all,” I say in Mandarin, “how’d you knock that guy out so easily?”
Sun points to the inside of his elbow. “It’s the fifth point of the lung meridian,” he says, matter-of-fact, like I’m supposed to know what the fuck that means. “Qi pools there.”
“So what happened to ‘delivering packages and sending messages’?” Jules asks, her eyes flashing. “What else have you left out? What is Ice, anyway?”
“I really do not know about Ice,” he says, looking at the floor with a pained expression on his face. “You have to understand, my job is like this: I do what Old Li says. If he tells me to beat someone up, I beat someone up. If he tells me to tell you some things, then I tell you what he said to say. And he told me to take you with me and get some things from the restaurant, so that’s what I did.”
Jules shoots me a frustrated look, and I can tell she’s also unsure of how to react to Sun’s words. Do we trust him? Can we blame him? Is this the real Sun, the real Dad that we’re learning about? Then Sun reaches into his backpack and pulls out a sheaf of paper held together with a binder clip, as well as the small lockbox that Jules and I saw sitting on the safe. My pulse pounds away as he uses his drill to break open the lockbox. There’s some cash inside, some receipts, a Chinese passport, and a dozen tiny Ziploc bags of white powder. Sun holds one up to the light, jiggles it a little, squints at it.
“K-zǎi,” Sun says. “Ketamine.”
“Ketamine?” I stick a finger into one of the bags: the powder is smoother than coke, not as floury. I’ve never heard of it before, but Jules, who has attended hipper parties, is ready with an explanation.
“People call it Special K. It’s also used in hospitals for anesthesia. People say it’s like an out-of-body experience. You get totally destroyed, your life fades away, and it feels like you’re swimming around. Down the K-hole.”
Sun nods. “It started in Hong Kong, but now people sniff it in nightclubs and karaoke rooms in all the big mainland cities. It helps people forget their problems and relax. But after a few years, it destroys your internal organs, starting with your bladder.”
“If that’s what Ice is, I see why Dad wanted to stay out of it,” I say.
“Rou Qiangjun flew into LAX on January twenty-second,” Jules mutters. She’s holding his passport open to the page with a U.S. visa pasted on it. “He was here a week before Dad died.”
“It had to be him—he’s the killer!” I say. “What are we gonna do?”
“Tell the cops, obviously,” Jules says.
“Have you met the cops around here? They couldn’t solve a crossword puzzle,” I say.
“So what, you’re gonna lace up your Nikes and don the mask of Zorro? Victor, have you lost your mind?”
Sun clears his throat delicately. “Lying about when he arrived here does not make Rou the killer. But even if he is, he’s only a tool used by others. And if we go after him now, then Zhao and Ouyang will know what we are up to, and then it will be much harder to gather evidence against them.”
“Wait, what are you saying?” Jules scowls at Sun. “You’re planning to go after Dad’s partners?”
Sun tips his chin toward the sheaf of paper. “Not my plan,” he says. “He said you have to read this and then you will understand.”
I pick up the document that Sun retrieved from the safe: a stack of white paper, printed in Mandarin and clipped to several sheets of yellow legal paper covered in Dad’s handwriting. I read the boldface characters printed in the middle of the first page: “Dài wŏ sǐ le, gěi wŏ de érzi—For my son, if I am dead.”